His previous owner was one of his old colonial friends who had stayed in the bled after Independence. This guy still practised khemmessat, a type of medieval serfdom consisting of attaching a man to a bit of land by way of an inextinguishable debt. My father must have had to pay a lot to buy off said debt, since he used to complain to all his old Tunisian friends living in France that his Arab had cost him a pretty penny . . . The wives of these colonials, nostalgic for the Moorish women they had left behind, would turn green with envy at the luxury in which my mother basked; not only did she own electrical appliances, but she had a slave to use them.

Bouchta didn’t work the land but instead took care of the housework and the cooking. He was what Malcolm X used to call the House Negro insofar as he accepted the authority of the Whites as the natural order. I simply can’t see any other explanation for the fact he didn’t murder us all, dog included, in our sleep after one too many exclamations of Bouchta, asba! on the part of my father; asba being the most vulgar expression you can imagine in Arabic — something along the lines of my cock up your mother’s ass — and universally used by the colonials to punctuate their speech.

Bouchta, asba, the soup! Asba, fissa, the cheese!

As to the question of poor Bouchta’s membership of the human species (and that of Arabs in general) my parents were, for once, in agreement.

In my father’s racial hierarchy — which had room for anti-Jewish, anti-Maltese, anti-Italian and even anti-pied-noir sentiment — and at the summit of which, as a Tunisian colonial, he put himself, Arabs had no place whatsoever. How could they? According to this scheme, Arabs were not people, but inconvenient and rebellious pieces of farming machinery. They were known as burnous, after their traditional hooded garments, evoking an image of flesh sweating away underneath as the maximum amount of juice was extracted.

At last, thanks to Bouchta’s presence and the power of the imagination to assimilate two utterly different places, The Estate became Tunisia, just as for Marguerite Duras the river Seine became the Mekong.

My father would joyfully bellow abuse in his nursery Arabic to his new plaything, whom he had dressed up as Nestor from Tintin in a striped waistcoat and bow tie. He had planted a fig tree, and — despite his lower back problems — would sit perched atop an oriental pouf while listening to Lili Boniche and Reinette l’Oranaise, favourites from his colonial youth.

For dinner, there would be roasted capsicums in oil and chicken with olives, with strudel for dessert — a sign of Austria’s continuing formal resistance.